Facebook Advertising is one of the cheapest paid marketing options to reach your real estate prospects. However, if you are not careful about audience targeting, Facebook may also end up being a money pit.
In this guide, I will explain a few tips that I have found to be very effective when you want to lower your Facebook advertising cost and get the most out of your ad spend.
If you are trying to target new leads, you should definitely experiment with these tips. For reaching people who have already visited your website, Facebook provides many highly effective targeting options such as retargeting, custom audience and lookalike audience. But since the subject of this guide is to explain to you how to lower your Facebook advertising costs when targeting new leads, we will focus on reaching new people who have never interacted with your brand online.
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Specific or narrow targeting vs broad targeting
The cost-per-result for your Facebook ads will primarily depend on what interests and demographics you are targeting.
While working with my real estate clients, I have found that if your interest and demographics targeting is very specific, the cost-per-result will be very high. It means you will pay more for clicks, leads and engagement (likes and shares). You will get better results, but the cost-per-conversion is going to be extremely high.
On the other hand, if your interest and demographics targeting is very broad, the cost-per-result in most cases will be comparatively lower, but this will bring down your conversion rate also.
It means that there are pros and cons of both the strategies.
While working with my real estate clients, I have found a solution somewhere in the middle. In my opinion, you should target a broad audience, but with specific demographics when trying to reach new prospects with your real estate Facebook Ads.
It means that you should find interests relevant to your ad objective and then target broader demographics that have shown interest in those particular ‘interests’ on Facebook.
And the best tool to do this is the Facebook Audience Insights tool
Facebook Audience Insights tool
This awesome free tool helps you know more about your target audience.
By using this tool, you can get a more specific idea of about the audience which will be interested in your ads. Here are a few things you can find out about your audience with this tool:
- Their age and gender
- Relationship status
- Education level
- Job titles
Let’s understand this with an example.
Let’s say you want to target people who are first-time home buyers in New York City. Some of the obvious interests on Facebook you would want to target are ‘First Time Home Buyer Grant’ and ‘mortgage loans’.
Now go to Audience Insights tool and type in New York City in the region/city field and then put in ‘First Time Home Buyer Grant’ and ‘Mortgage Loans’ in the interest field.
On the right side of the screen, you will get the data about the demographics which would be interested in first time home buyer grants and mortgage loans.
For example, 50% of the audience on Facebook interested in first time home buyers and mortgages are married, 66% have a college degree and almost 24% of the people work in management industry.
You can use this demographics data when setting up a real estate Facebook campaign.
This will not only lower your Facebook advertising cost substantially, but also help you target more specific audience. You get the best of both worlds.
When you are retargeting leads
If you are retargeting people who have already interacted with your brand, there are many ways to lower your cost.
Some of them include:
- Use Facebook’s Audience Overlap feature to know if your ads are competing against each-other
- Retarget people who have already visited your website
- Create Custom and Lookalike Audience. A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers. For retargeting and Lookalike audience, you will need to set up Facebook Pixel on your website.
- Put a cap on bidding amount
- Use videos in your ads because they have a better organic reach
- Write captivating ad copy
- Do A/B testing
So these were some of the tips realtors, real estate brokers and real estate investors can use for lowering their Facebook Ad spend and getting a better conversion.
Let me know in comments if you have any questions.